We visited the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve headquarters yesterday which is about 15 miles from Pawhuska which is the closest small town to the Preserve headquarters. This 15 miles is down a gravel road. When we pulled up to the head quarters a lady came out and greeted us as we were getting out of the car. We stood on the porch and talked and while we wanted to go in and see what was in the shop she made no motion to go inside. A couple of minutes later an elderly gentleman came out and the lady (his sister) didn't get a word in edge wise after that. He was very nice and spoke non stop for the next 15 minutes. We did get to go inside and bought a couple of mementos to take with us but then he stood in front of the door and didn't want to let us out. He spoke about the prairie and the buffalo and the grass and the property owners and the grass and the buffalo. We finally got to leave but as we left we thought the both of them hadn't seen or spoke to anyone in so long they just wanted to talk our legs off. They were very nice but we still laughed about it for an hour after we left.
Today started out great. The UPS lady showed up at our door this morning with our replacement Dish receiver we ordered a couple of days ago. Without this receiver showing up today we would have had to stay another day in Tulsa. The receiver was for the bedroom tv. When we pulled in to the park we got no signal and after several investigations into possible problems and help from other Newmar owners I (we) figured out it was the receiver. With the new receiver we are back in business. In fact we are better than we were before since I also added a hard drive to this receiver that allows us to record tv programs to it. Before we could only record to the living room hard drive. After talking the dogs for a walk we were headed to downtown Tulsa.
We headed out to see the Golden Driller on 21st street before going into the big city (Tulsa has around 500k people). Our first order of business downtown was to find a UPS drop box in order to ship the old Dish receiver back to Dish. After a few stops we successfully dropped off the receiver. In this building, the Mid Continent, we wanted to take a picture of the marble and tile but a security guard said that is not allowed but he did tell us about the underground walkway so underground we went. After going a few blocks under the city we stopped at the "Center of the Universe" which is a circle on the middle of a pedestrian cross walk in the middle of several buildings. The unusual thing about this spot is whenever you stood on that exact spot and said anything your echo would immediately come back to you, but only you. People standing a few feet away would not hear the echo. We were skeptical but it really worked. Walked around a few blocks then drove to the store and headed back to the rv where we had a few things to do.
Tomorrow we are heading toward Amarillo, Texas. Will probably stay two to four days depending on how much there is to see. We know we will visit the Cadillac Ranch on route 66 but not sure what else we will want to see while we are there. We are trying to get into an rv park that has a spa with a pool, sauna, and hot tub but it was full as of today but the owner told Huli to call back tomorrow. If we can't get into that park we will go to plan B.
Here are a few pictures from today.
This is a famous Tulsa landmark called the Golden Driller.
In many buildings around Tulsa there are oil and gas companies with offices and head quarters all over the place. You couldn't always tell it from the outside but since we walked inside many of the downtown buildings to stores or just to take a short cut in the air conditioning you saw there company logos on the walls. Oil and natural gas has been very very good to Tulsa.
Janet got this picture of an old mail box before the security guard said we couldn't take pictures inside this building. Other buildings had no issue with pictures. On the internet they even said many welcome people taking an interest in their buildings and encouraged pictures. Many of the building were of the Art Deco design and were built in the 20's and 30's.
We are now underground heading toward the vault.
I wanted to make a withdrawal but no luck.
This is the "Center of the Universe" stand in the middle of that circle and everything you say echos immediately back to you without the people standing close to you being able to hear it. Go figure.
Don't know how or why it does what it does.
